Modernising Justice through IT, 1

14 June 2007 by Rod McLaren

Part one of my notes from GovNet’s Modernising Justice through IT event, 12 June 2007.

Generally, it was very good and informative. If I were to find fault it would be that there wasn’t quite enough time for meeting people. Some of the talks were a little encumbered with consulting speak but none of them were poor, which was impressive. It’s clear that the Justice ecosystem has a lot of talented people working in it, and everyone is very committed to making things better.

Mobile readers may find the Blackberry/Bedfordshire Police case study interesting (and my thanks to our partners at RIM who got us into the event at short notice). My comments are in square brackets.

Sir Michael Bichard, former Permanent Secretary for the Department of Education and Employment (now DfES), and Chair of the Soham Inquiry :

• [Bichard is best known for chairing the inquiry into the Soham murders – his reports 2004 and subsequent implementation progress reports 2004-7 pointed the finger at intelligence failures and poor data management in Police organisations. Several other speakers will refer to Bichard’s inquiry and recommendations, which are sufficiently canonic now that they sometimes take the abbreviated form “Bichard 7” and so on. These notes won’t capture it, but he is very impressive: the sense of an enormous competence, worn lightly.]
• we should be integrating IT [with process and people], not just adding it [throwing it at them]
• issues: of trust, information sharing challenges, of gov[’s record of] IT delivery
• “IT is the only way to deliver affordable, high-quality public services”
• it may be that IT becomes a [barometer, ie a visible measure] of whether we’re delivering successfully
• [later when questioned on progress since his inquiry, Bichard says that he sees some good progress, but some programmes – eg IMPACT NI and Police Natnl DB particularly – are going far too slow. “There’s a huge amount happening, but we’re not yet at the point where we have a joined-up system”]

A Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century – Alex Allan, Permanent Secretary Ministry of Justice :

• funny anecdote about editing a Nigel Lawson speech with scissors when it was already being delivering from a tape-based autocue [Allan is confident, funny, and reassures us that there are clever people running things on the inside of government]
• Joined-up justice: partnership working with organisations outside of the Criminal Justice System; securing trust through IT-enabled performance
• about people’s lives, service delivery to citizens, not just about efficiency.
• complexity in courts and in wider CrimJustice system: “Delivering justice is… hard” [an orchestration of people challenge as much as anything]
• cites CJIT-led projects Compass – CPS case management; Xhibit – court hearing management [not to be confused with Xzibit, west coast rapper ]; OASys – offender assessment
• how do we “drive out” the business benefits [ensure they happen] – can’t just stick IT into operations and do a bit of training.
• Cites Varney report 2006 [on public service delivery and transformation] and Steinberg’s Power of Information Review 2007

Information Systems: enabling the right environment for world class prosecution – Claire Hamon Director, Business Information Systems, Crown Prosecution Service :

• we need to “recognise that technology in and of itself has little value” – need to integrate into people and into business processes. A people-led approach to transformation.
• expect to invest 10% of the dev budget [annually] just to stay at the same level
• “liberating assets” [sounds like: providing an API]: CPS’s witness mgmt systems now used by more police users than CPS users
• Progress system (case progression tool) to go live in 2007
• growing financial awareness: project/programme/IT discipline, professionalism
• benefits measurement: benchmarking to meet criteria for future funding conditions
• nb that Joining Up can also increase system dependencies [risk]
• fixing process: “if you automate a broken business process, you get a broken automated process…”

[Everyone’s language is carefully “business” rather than “public sector”, part of the programme to re-present government as improving/fixed.]

NPIA IMPACT: Providing 21st century solutions for 21st century crime – Nick Tofiluk, Assistant Chief Constable [West Mids Police?], IMPACT Programme Director, National Policing Improvement Agency :

• problem: local force databases, poor access inter- and intra-force. The historic local/inward context and focus understandable [but must stop, he’s saying]
• key projects – IMPACT nominal index, Police Nat db, MoPI
• IMPACT nominal index: currently 50m records, will have 75m, with 170k checks made to date [doesn’t sound like a large number]
• Police National Database: “connectivity” between data/org silos, people, objects, locations and events; being tendered currently, earliest deployment 2009-2010; aims: reduce crime, increase safety-security (incl officer safety), public reassurance [with the nominal index, is this a key plank of the National Identity Register project?]
• national db: “the possible permutations in 70m [connected] records is infinite” [said as if plenitude will solve everything]
• MoPI – standards for data, code of practice; full police force compliance planned for 2010
• [it has to be said that the rebrand from PITO seems to be working: these guys do sound more credible now]

[So that’s four polished performers in a row. Thus far, the main themes are:

• the criminal justice system is really complex
• people and business processes are more important than technology, but…
• information is the silver bullet, particularly access-to-, capturing-more, connected- and analysis-of…
• so connect everything together [in fact, there’s so much talk of connected information, it feels like the people are disappearing]
• top-down programmes of transformational change will get the job done]

Reducing the burden of Audit Compliance in UK Police – a Kent Police Case Study – Andy Barker, Head of IT, Kent Police (and Peter Regent, Novell):

• ACPO IS Community Security Policy – compliance reqs
• problems: many disparate audit logs, time consuming harvesting, reactive audit analysis, frustrated security teams, systems over-complex so eg the Professional Standards people come direct to IT rather than having their own access…
• thus: “number of trusted employees is too high” [trusted with high levels of access]
• Peter Regent, Novell: Sentinel product – “remediation workflow”
• [So here audit means: surveillance of own users for security or process breaches (the staff who spend too long on eBay), rather than audits that present information proving service delivery to the citizens they represent. I wonder what motivation impacts there are on staff using networks and systems when they realise how closely their activity is being monitored.]

Joining Up the Criminal Justice System Enabled Through IT – Tunde Coker, Chief Information Officer, Criminal Justice Information Technology :

• CJS ecosystem: 2% of the UK workforce
• core systems: XI exchange, Xhibit portal, secure email, Progress portal
• Bichard 7: court data coming through to police
• stages: underpinning frameworks (“the heavy lifting”); light touch integration; extend/integrate CJ IT, web
• [10:35 – day’s first mention of youth and social software]
• Virtual courts prototype: defence and prosecution at a police station, court at a magistrate’s court, document collaboration and videoconferencing in between.

Q and A following the first six talks

• Q: All this talk about more info, more connected. What about garbage-in-garbage-out? What about training? A, CPS: Yes. 6,000 trained and within 3mo of app(s) going live, subsequent deskside support. However, new systems tend to change processes themselves, so need to adapt both the training and system itself [in response]. CPS user: “it’s our system [now], we change it”. A, CJIT: make apps that are easier to use and easier to train
• Q: The CJS “ringfenced” budget ends March08, so how do we ensure that benefit realisation doesn’t collapse into a local/parochial/blinkered process? A, NPIA: Do services realise that given PND, there may be cost savings internally, so retaining big picture view critical
• Q: impact of HO/MofJ split upon joined-up justice? A, CPS: [talked smoothly of it being positive development, but seemed like fluff]
• Q from Bichard: what about [legacy] mistrust between agencies? A, CPS: trusts people and relationships, but less so the information unless she understands the business process that generated it [and inadvertently puts her finger on one of the problems of top-down systems: to everyone, top-down seems like a distant person who just doesn’t get it. This also seems to obliquely answer the question. Cross-agency and cross-person trust is a real issue and I believe it only starts to get solved when X provides something to Y that tangibly makes Y’s work easier.]
• Q: What about the DDA? A, everyone: oh yes, it’s important.
• Q, Cumbria police officer: [if you’re doing all this good stuff, then] why can’t we send an electronic file to the CPS yet? Xerox is our most important tool, still! A, CPS: we have the technology, yes, but it’s an issue of business process, legals (including “wet signatures” [original, ink]), resilience, police systems, and not just a CPS problem. A, CJIT: systemically, we still have a lot of paper in the system. Needs tech-business-legal alignment. [All of which is true, but illustrates one of the persistent soft problems: staff in the field do not care about business process – all of this stuff is (rightly) irrelevant to them. They just want the problems to go away and to do their job well.]

[At this point, it feels like the people – the users in the criminal justice system, the citizens it serves, and the offenders it manages – have been somewhat forgotten in the talk of technology serving business processes, and super-connected information and data.]

Part two soon.

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